The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma (24 page)

Messages had come in from many people, but he only knew the names, not details of what they said or what they wanted. Each day Dr. Mora let him know who they were, but said every one of them would have to wait until the experiments were completed. Joss was suspicious of how the doctor was handling this, suspected he was using those people as leverage, trying to get him to cooperate faster. The previous afternoon there had been three visitors turned away, among them his roommate, Andruw Twitty. A positive note, after all.

“Tell Andruw not to come around anymore,” Joss had said. “Warn him he could be in danger, based on what I did to him in the hospital room. The power contained in my body could just cut loose and kill him, without my intent. Tell him to have all of my things packed up and sent here, and to avoid me entirely. For his own safety.”

Joss had watched Mora's eyes narrow, and the man had responded, “Are you threatening
me
as well? Anyone who displeases you, in the slightest degree?”

“I never said Andruw displeases me.”

“But he does, doesn't he? We have his reports, so we know how you were not always forthright with him when he asked you questions.”

“He was supposed to be my roommate, but he had a habit of acting as if I were an eco-criminal being interrogated. It wore on me.”

“Just as I do?”

“Are you trying to provoke me, Doctor? Isn't that a bit dangerous under the circumstances?”

Mora had shaken his head. “No, just trying to understand you.”

“Well, don't believe everything Andruw says. He's ambitious and self-centered, doesn't care who he has to run over to advance himself.”

“Sometimes words mean very little, don't they?” Mora had said. It had been an interesting comment, perhaps designed to engage Joss in conversation, to let his guard down and draw him in. But instead he had retreated inward, without responding.…

Today, galvanized by Joss's impromptu discoveries, Dr. Mora had been conducting additional experiments in the confinement area, getting Joss to target various types of objects that were made of different materials, from a soft pear to bars of steel and titanium. Joss had disintegrated every object and transformed it into runny goo, discovering in the process that he had quite a good aim, which gave the handlers some degree of relief. Using the fingers of one hand or the other (or even both hands at once) to originate the blasts didn't seem to matter; in any of these ways Joss could perform the trick, but they were going to conduct further tests on intensity.

Next, Dr. Mora and two assistants brought in a cart that contained a variety of electronic instruments, some of which he said would check the discharge strength every time Joss fired the beams of energy. In a form of target practice, they'd lined up bottles on a ledge, from a rubber bottle to a dark gray one made of an alloy so dense and heavy that it required a particularly large, strong man to carry in the object and put it in place.

They then asked Joss to aim carefully at the bottles, one at a time, while not damaging the ledge, if he could. This proved to be no problem, and he amused himself a little by bringing forth either hand at a time, or both at once, for his weapon source, and then firing as quickly as he could. With his heightened metabolism, that proved to be quite fast, and he heard gasps of astonishment behind him as black threads of energy coalesced into beams and struck the bottles hard, melting them, one after another.

It didn't surprise Joss to learn that it required more power to disintegrate and transform the alloy than the rubber. That seemed like common sense. The level of variation, however, was not very much. When an assistant reported this to Dr. Mora, Joss noticed concern in the doctor's face, and saw him take the assistant aside to discuss it further with him in private.

Finally the doctor came forward and said, “I'd like you to repeat what we saw you do on surveillance the other night—cut two holes in the wall.” He looked at the wall that Joss had damaged, and marks where the damage had been repaired.

“All right.” As before, Joss pointed the fingers of one hand, shooting streaks of black to cut two new holes. As before, the second one was larger than the first.

One of the assistants reported the power readings, technical jargon that Joss didn't understand. A young man with round spectacles, he read from a screen on his instrument cart.

“Only a little more power than for the alloy,” Dr. Mora said.

“You reinforced the wall on the other side,” Joss said. “I noticed a difference. What did you use?”

Dr. Mora shrugged. “Who knows what they come up with in SciO laboratories? Even if I knew, I couldn't tell you. But honestly, I don't know. One more thing of note. The power readings are the same from either of your hands, and do not increase at all when you use both hands at once.”

His gaze narrowed as he added, “Look, I'll be frank with you. I'm wondering if you can generate more power than we have seen here. This may be too confined an area to check, and I don't want you to do so now, but do you feel like you could do more than you have so far—I mean, melting or cutting larger or denser objects?”

Joss scowled. He found himself glaring at the instrument cart and all of its intrusive technology. “Even if I know, perhaps I shouldn't tell you.”

The doctor smiled stiffly. “You're joking, aren't you? Aren't we trying to figure this out together?'

“Maybe I'm just tired of it for today. Please, go away and leave me to watch some movies or listen to music, OK?”

“If you wish, but—”

“Do you think it's easy being a lab rat? I'm a human being, remember, and I'm getting sick of watching you collect data on—” Joss caught himself, as he wondered how
human
he still was. He had cellular remnants of that, certainly, judging from the shape of his body and his speech patterns, and—he thought—the way his mind worked. But he was especially troubled by that green keloid scarring on his skin that resembled vines, and he was fatigued from trying to control the very disturbing power inside his body, the intrusion of SciO technology.

“But
are
you still human? Isn't that what you were just wondering?”

“So far, my private thoughts remain my own,” Joss said. “Now go, please. Just go. We'll talk again tomorrow.”

With only a few conciliatory words in response, Dr. Mora turned and led his assistants out of the chambers, taking their rolling cart and all of its instruments with him.

Exasperated, Joss sat on the couch in his private entertainment area, but he had no interest in a movie or music. For several moments he stared at a projection on one wall that showed a view of the sun-drenched Berkeley skyline, and fleecy clouds in a blue sky. He longed to be free, to actually be
out
there. He didn't even have a real window, so the images he saw by projection could be entirely false. His handlers were worried about him escaping.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized that there might never be an end to the probing and testing, the endless questions and demands from unrelenting, ever-curious scientists. He envisioned the ordeal of moving from one stage of analysis to another, with each thing he did leading to more questions, and additional experiments that no one had yet imagined.

He heard buzzing noises, and looking up he noticed flies darting around the ceiling of the chamber. Lots of flies. Where were they coming from? He noticed a pattern, that they seemed to be coming from the dining chamber—and they were descending, buzzing around him.

Damned things!
They must have been released intentionally by the SciOs.

Joss stared dumbly at his hands, focused on the fingertips. Suddenly, without his apparent volition, he felt an awakening in his body, the now-familiar gathering roar of power in his ears that he thought might be blood surging in his veins, like a river of white water roaring through tubes.

He hadn't commanded the energy to reemerge, but it was doing so just the same, and this time he didn't think he objected. Maybe he would use it against the pesky little insects! Then he realized he'd been upset with them just before the surge in power, the emotional factor again. It also seemed to him that he needed to be careful if he ever became upset with a person. Would he still be able to control the discharge of Dark Energy?

A shimmering black thread—a single, thin strand—shot from his left forefinger and zapped a fly, turning the creature into goo and dropping it to the floor. With a casual, involuntary wave of Joss's hands, additional focal threads came out, killing more flies. Now he interjected his own conscious thoughts, and found that he could fire from one finger at a time, or from two, or from all of them at once if he wished—and this time the threads of energy didn't coalesce; they remained separate, each of them with striking power. He killed one fly after another, and even ten simultaneously with a set of micro-blasts from both hands.

Then, looking into the adjacent dining chamber, he saw more flies flitting around. This time he found that he could fire the threads longer distances, and every time he saw one of the creatures fall he understood a little more.

Thought to action. Nearly instantaneous.
Zap, zap, zap!

It was almost fun, but it also frightened him. Operating as it did from his fingers, the power seemed to almost be a supercharged form of kinesthesia—muscle energy and muscle memory, resulting in death.…

He worried that he might not be able to control the invasive energy in his body. Because of this, Joss didn't want to go to the next stage quite yet, if there was one. So he decided to withdraw the strands and reassess the situation. He sent that mental command.

But against his will, the threads remained stubbornly in the air, near his fingertips. He became conscious of his pulse racing, and as he realized this, it slowed immediately.

Experimenting, he wove an energy field in the air between the fingers of both hands, creating additional black threads with casual gestures, and hardly any mental impetus. Just a little was all that was required.

Even more flies appeared from the dining chamber, flitting about, racing from one point to another without alighting. Not learning from their predecessors, they circled Joss's head, diving this way and that. He counted four, five, then eight. This time he didn't zap them. Something else seemed possible.

With practice he found that he could weave the threads of the energy field around his body, keeping them there, and sure enough, the remaining flies moved away from him, repelled by the field. As moments passed, the field weakened, and the flies drew nearer, but not too close, as if sensing danger.

This was intriguing to Joss, and he was gratified that he was able to exert some control over the discharges and the patterns they formed in the air. Maybe with practice the threads of energy would go away. He made several more attempts, generating new energy fields and leaving different black contrail patterns in the air around him. The airborne shapes he created didn't seem to matter much, because each time he recharged the system the flies flew farther away. With practice, he found that the fields lasted longer and longer—up to several minutes.

Curiously, he detected flashes of color around the edges: blues, reds, greens, and yellows … Then, as if his earlier mental command had finally taken hold, the fields dissipated.

 

25

The Green States of America contains its own seeds of destruction, and eventually the nation will rot away like organic forest matter and vanish into the Earth on its own. Just the same, we have chosen to add a catalyst, in order to hasten the process.

—General Dylan Bane, in an address to his allies

SELECTING THE PLACES
to strike had been like picking from a tray of glittering jewels. There were so many enticing targets in the Green States of America—two continents of government offices, military installations, and reservations for humans. In the end, he narrowed the list down to nine military bases of the Army of the Environment—Berkeley, San Diego, Seattle, Bostoner, Baltimore, Miami, Panama City, Rio de Janeiro, and Valparaiso. All were ports where the GSA had naval bases, including submarines armed with the most advanced nuclear missiles. At each location, he had plans to disable any subs that were docked, or commandeer them. He had intelligence reports that only fifteen percent of their underwater warships were out to sea—a defensive lapse—so he might just catch the enemy napping.

The powerful entities that gave Bane money trusted him to make his own decisions, because their interests aligned with his, at least to a degree. But he had ways of maintaining control over all of his dealings, secrets his allies did not know, and never would. It was that way in all of his affairs; no one ever learned
everything
of importance about him, or what he was thinking.

Dylan Bane didn't care one way or another about any loss of life in the military assaults. He thought only about inflicting maximum physical and psychological impact on the enemy, on causing panic in their ranks and sending the survivors scurrying for cover like rats from a storm. There would be no hiding places for some of these green rats, and especially not for his own former superior, Arch Ondex, or for the hypocritical guru Rahma and the rest of the GSA hierarchy. He had planned horrendous deaths for that bunch.

But now, just as he was about to launch forty-five voleers in attack squadrons from his subterranean Michoacán base, he felt a trembling around him, and saw most of the master control panel lights arrayed before him flicker off.

“Earthquake, sir!” one of the young male officers reported. His voice wavered. “It's centered a hundred and twelve kilometers southwest of here, and it's put eight of our squadrons offline, forty voleers. They're working on getting them online again.”

“Any damage to our ships?”